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All Things Star Wars

Sith or Jedi?

  • Sith

    Votes: 33 37.1%
  • Jedi

    Votes: 51 57.3%
  • Chuck Norris

    Votes: 5 5.6%

  • Total voters
    89
Goonies iiiin Spaaaaace!!!! :)

I'm actually kinda liking it -- and more than I expected to, given the Disney shows to date.
 
Goonies iiiin Spaaaaace!!!! :)

I'm actually kinda liking it -- and more than I expected to, given the Disney shows to date.
Though Jod Na Nawood character is notably more comely and coherent as, "the one adult in the merry band," than Sloth was.
 
Skeleton Crew on route to being the best live action star wars since Andor. Who knew.
 
Honestly yes, lowest expectations and a pleasant surprise! Not exempt of cringe moments but... it's kids. It's very well done and handled.
 
I saw this now, by chance - and yet it does include an extended reference to SW, and one quite infamous in our little thread ^^


But it's worth watching regardless imo. Filmed before I was born...
 
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Alright everyone, I'm in a dilemma.

Darths and Droids has started Episode IX. To date it is the only mainline film I have not seen, and the question's been looming large for a few weeks now whether to ride in blind like memnarch, or bite the bullet so I'll catch the Comic Irregulars' twists and turns.

I'd waffled on Rogue One, but that was a film I'd still intended to watch (ultimately caved and saw it before the chapter was deep underway). TRoS, though, is not.

For those who've suffered the full reel, is there substantial context I'll miss, or are all the highlights in the memes?
 
I mean you probably will miss context but I beg you to not do this. It's better you don't get it.
 
If you watch episode IX without a specific mindset you will have a very bad time. I saw it years after release with the intent of understanding how deep they F up and I had an ok time, sort of like when you watch a documentary on how the worst decisions in the world + some bad luck can bring you an awful film despite many people trying to do their best to do something ok. You cannot, I repeat CANNOT watch this film thinking that it is a star wars film.
 
Alright everyone, I'm in a dilemma.

Darths and Droids has started Episode IX. To date it is the only mainline film I have not seen, and the question's been looming large for a few weeks now whether to ride in blind like memnarch, or bite the bullet so I'll catch the Comic Irregulars' twists and turns.

I'd waffled on Rogue One, but that was a film I'd still intended to watch (ultimately caved and saw it before the chapter was deep underway). TRoS, though, is not.

For those who've suffered the full reel, is there substantial context I'll miss, or are all the highlights in the memes?
Look, I watched Episode 8 exactly the once and got as flabbergasted (in a bad way) as anybody else, and then when D&D started riffing on the film I was mostly reminded of how incredibly stupid the films have been. I intend to go through their ‘edition’ of the Han Solo film without having watched the film.
 
You cannot, I repeat CANNOT watch this film thinking that it is a star wars film.

Our experiences clearly differed, because all the time I was watching IX, I was thinking that VI did it 40 years earlier and a lot better. I'm more charitable than most, because Palpatine returning is actually a major plot point in the original EU (not that it was good then!), but I predicted several of the Big Moments on-screen because that's what RotJ did too.
 
Finished with Skeletor's Crew.

Jude Law and SM "C-Can't say I remember no At Attin." 33 carried the show.

CGI Hutt's have come a long way.

SKELETON-CREW-Ep5-01.gif


Pre-ep8 -

How ‘The Acolyte’ Beat Star Wars ‘Skeleton Crew’​


Star Wars is having somewhat of a resurgence right now. A lukewarm reception to the third season of The Mandalorian in 2023 was followed by Ahsoka which was only slightly better-received by audiences. The nadir was last year's The Acolyte, the worst-reviewed Star Wars show in history. Then came Skeleton Crew, which captured the hearts of fans with its 1980s-inspired storyline. However, it doesn't appear to have been enough to make its mark.


Skeleton Crew stars Jude Law as a quick-witted space pirate who has mastered the all-powerful force and befriends a group of children trying to find their way home after getting lost in the galaxy. The eight-part Disney+ streaming series is a coming of age story with similarities to beloved 1985 adventure movie The Goonies.


Like The Goonies it has been a hit with fans and critics alike. After seven episodes Skeleton Crew has earned an impressive rating of 91% from critics on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes whilst audiences have awarded it a respectable 80%. Word about it doesn't seem to have spread far though as Skeleton Crew didn't make it into Nielsen’s Top 10 Original Streaming chart in its first two weeks.

Surprisingly Skeleton Crew failed to qualify despite debuting its first two episodes on the same night. During the week of its premiere the bottom spot on Nielsen’s streaming originals list was occupied by The Great British Baking Show, which was viewed for 382 million minutes meaning that Skeleton Crew came to less than that.

This puts the average per episode under 191 million minutes making it lower than the 244 million for each of The Acolyte's first two instalments which both appeared in Nielsen's top ten list. There may be good reason why Skeleton Crew wasn't so lucky.

The female-focused cast of The Acolyte led to it courting controversy before it had even launched. It led to the show being branded woke and getting review-bombed. In turn, its cast and showrunner Leslye Headland had to defend its diversity and inclusivity throughout the run of the show which kept it in the public eye.

It may explain why The Acolyte's finale returned to Nielsen's Top 10, albeit in the the bottom place, despite the show being far from perfect in line with its 78% critics' rating on Rotten Tomatoes and its much lower 19% audience score.

The questionable caliber of the show kept people talking, as did this author's revelation that it cost Disney a staggering $207.8 million to make. What's more, its diversity only appeared to be skin deep as a follow up report revealed that just 30% of the 695 employees on the show were female and across the entire workforce, women's average hourly pay was 19.4% lower than men’s.


That fueled yet more media coverage and so did Disney's decision to to scrap plans for a second season just over a month after the curtain came down on the first one. At times The Acolyte was the talk of the town and Disney made the most of it. As user Robert V wrote on X, "I saw ads for Acolyte after it was canceled!"


With so many talking points, it's perhaps no surprise that The Acolyte was rarely out of the media during its run. As the chart below shows, 4,911 articles mentioned The Acolyte last year with a massive 34.6% of them coming in June when the show premiered. In contrast, Skeleton Crew was only mentioned 2,895 times in 2024 with the peak during its December debut being 21.5% lower than The Acolyte's tally in the month it launched.

SKELETON CREW Media graph

'The Acolyte' v 'Skeleton Crew' media mentions

MSM
The data comes from Factiva, a search engine owned by Dow Jones which spans more than two billion articles from 33,000 news, data and information sources in 32 languages. Factiva is constantly updated so its archive is as comprehensive as they come.


There are two reasons why the media dominance of The Acolyte caused a disturbance in the force for Skeleton Crew. Firstly, it sent out a signal that Star Wars may be past its prime. Secondly it led to Star Wars fatigue making media outlets less likely to write about a solid show with no controversial angles so soon after one which became famous for all the wrong reasons.


As a result, Skeleton Crew has only attracted 59% of the coverage that The Acolyte got and it doesn't seem to have been watched as much despite being far better reviewed. Many potential viewers may not even know that it is playing and it could have The Acolyte to thank for that. With only one episode remaining they don't have long to find out.
 
It's rather unnatural to act like humankind as a whole already has all the franchises it needs to express ideas or create entertainment, and so those franchises stick around after decades. The price for enabling this phenomenon - which clearly rests mostly on corporate greed and laziness - is a decrease in quality as more and more iterations of the same idea are presented.
SW is as representative a case of that as any.
 
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